Corrections or additions?
These articles by Kathleen McGinn Spring and Barbara Fox were
prepared for the May 30, 2001 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights
reserved.
Life in the Fast Lane
Mark Gross’s family has been in business for a long
time — more than 100 years, but not in the same business. Spurred
on by new ideas, or derailed by changing consumer behavior, his family
went from poultry to wallpaper, and when wallpaper ran into a wall
it couldn’t beat, his father retired, his brother sought work as a
controller, and he founded Bon-Ton Financial Strategies.
“My great grandfather, Harry Gross, had a poultry store,”
Gross recounts. “Every Thursday, instead of hanging chickens in
the window, he hung wallpaper.” Customers liked the display, and
soon wallpaper sales and installation replaced poultry as the family
business. Called Bon-Ton, French for “good for you,” the
company
opened a chain of retail wallpaper stores from south Jersey to
Harrisburg,
and operated them from 1899 through 1962.
The stores were sold in 1962, the year before Mark Gross was born,
and the company switched its focus to manufacturing, import, and
distribution.
Gross studied economics at the University of Chicago (Class of 1985)
and went to work for Arthur Andersen as a systems analyst for several
years after graduation. He then went to work for the family business,
which was headquartered in Philadelphia, and employed some 50 people
in the late-1980s.
By 1996, Gross saw that the game was up for regional wallpaper
distributors.
Superstores like Home Depot had put hardware stores out of business,
and the ripples went down the line, affecting all sorts of companies
that had supplied the hardware stores, wallpaper distributors among
them. “It was very disappointing to see it could not go on,”
Gross says. “It was what I hoped to do with my life and my career,
but it just was not viable.”
Gross’ father and brother continued on for four more years, and then,
last year, sold the company to Duron, a Beltsville, Maryland paint
manufacturer as an “also.” Duron previously had purchased
another family wallpaper distribution company, and now, Gross says,
will sell paint and “also” wallpaper.
Bon-Ton was the last regional wallpaper distributor in the
Philadelphia.
“It’s all national now,” Gross says of the business. But Gross
wanted to keep at least the name.
His Bon-Ton Financial Strategies will cater to both individuals and
small companies, selling a very 21st Century product — advice.
In some ways more competitive than poultry or wallpaper, the financial
advice business also has big players, the Merrill Lynchs and
Prudential
Securities, for example. Gross says this does not concern him.
“Modern
technology means I can sell more products,” he says. “And
I can keep my cost structure lower than multi-level corporations.”
Another advantage for the independent in this arena, he says, is that
they don’t have to worry about corporate goals. “A corporation
has to increase its profits at a certain level each year,” he
says. This can create tension between a need to get clients’
portfolios
to perform at a certain level and a need to focus on each client’s
goals.
Gross says each client is different, and no formula for asset
allocation
fits everyone, but he does have some general guidelines for beginning
an investment program.
Take stock. “Most people don’t know what they’reworth,”Gross says. And many are pleasantly surprised. But whatever the bottomline, it is important to tote up the current value of all assets,and then subtract all debts. This exercise will provide valuableinformationon how much money can be put into investments.Face the music. “A lot of people are scared of goingto the doctor for a check-up,” Gross says. “It’s the samewith a financial consultant.” The reason people procrastinate,he says, is “they’re afraid of what they’ll hear.”Quantify goals. Whether it’s a new car or a comfortableretirement, folks who put their goals in writing are more likely toachieve them. There will always be uncertainty, Gross says, but notknowing how inflation will perform, whether all seven of your childrenwill go to college, or how many years past retirement you will live,should not be a bar to mapping out a financial path.”The sooner you start, the better you’ll end up,” Grosssays. Even if the winds of change take your business from poultryto wallpaper to financial planning.— Kathleen McGinn SpringBon-Ton Financial Strategies, 993 Lenox Drive,Suite 200, Lawrenceville 08648. 609-844-7639; fax, 609-844-7618.Home page: www.bon-tonfinancial.com.Top Of PageNew in FinanceAmeriCredit Corp. (ACF), 5 Vaughn Drive, ThirdFloor, Princeton 08540. Karen Brown, area general manager.609-514-0222;fax, 609-514-1584. Home page: www.americredit.comThe national consumer finance company opened its eighth New Jerseybranch on Vaughn Drive last month. Even though AmeriCredit makesthree-fourthsof its loans for used cars, and the used car market is generally flat,the company is growing at the rate of 30 percent a year and has 4,000franchised automobile dealer customers and more than 700,000 vehicleloans.Matt Malatich of CB Richard Ellis represented the tenant in afive-yearlease for 1,860 feet. Diane Chayes represented the owner, Mack-CaliRealty Corp. Karen Brown, the area general manager, has five yearsexperience in the auto loan business, most recently with AmeriCredit’sPhiladelphia office.Based in Fort Worth, Texas, AmeriCredit concentrates on middle marketauto loans and bills itself as “the world’s largest and mostsuccessfulindependent middle market auto finance company.” (Largercompetitors,such as Ford and Chrysler, are associated with auto manufacturers.)”Middle market” is another way of saying “sub prime.”Applicants for these loans probably have some kind of credit problemand do not qualify for the best loan rates. Nevertheless, the companyhas worked out a way to manage its risk effectively . “We havean elaborate scoring system, considering some 200 behavioral factors,that we review through computer models,” says spokesperson JohnHoffman. “Yet the vast majority of our decisions are same-dayloans. We try to focus on this area and do it very well.”Credit Suisse/First Boston Corp., 302 CarnegieCenter, Second Floor, Princeton 08540. Jeff Detweiler, president ofCFSB Financial Corporation. 609-627-5095; fax, 609-627-5011. Homepage: www.csfb.comInto the newest building of the Carnegie Center has moved an arm ofthe bank’s residential mortgage sales and trading operation. This30-person office originates residential mortgages and trades mortgagedebt and loans. (Mortgage debt, a security is issued by Ginnie Maeor Fannie Mae, is backed by a pool of mortgages.) A data center ofCSFB still has about 130 employees at 700 College Road.Jeff Detweiler, president of CSFB Financial Corporation, is in chargeof acquiring residential mortgage whole loans, and he is responsiblefor sales, operations, analytics, technology, and servicing. He waswith Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette when it was acquired late last yearby CSFB; he is integrating the strategies of the two organizations.An alumnus of Princeton University, Detweiler has worked at FBSMortgage,Independence One Mortgage Corporation, Michigan National Bank, andGMAC-RFC.CitiFinancial (C), 510 Route 130, Suite 5, EastWindsor 08520. Dinesh Goswami, branch manager. 609-371-2373; fax,609-371-2866. Home page: www.citifinancial.comThe loan company expanded with a move from Suite 17 to Suite 5 andhas five employees. It offers personal and home equity loans andmortgage refinancing. Another retail branch is at Ames Plaza onQuakerbridge Road.Top Of PageContracts AwardedConnotate Technologies, 303 George Street, NewBrunswick 08901. Thomas Pisello, president and CEO. 732-296-8844;fax, 732-296-0330. Home page: www.connotate.comEarly in May the data mining software company announced that it raised$1.7 million toward its $2.7 million goal in Series A financing. NewYork-based Trautman Wasserman & Company managed the private funding.Connotate has automated software tools to monitor and mine Internetcontent and convert it into a form available to enterprise portals,business intelligence, and content management databases. The software”learns” the page layout of a website, extracts the content,and delivers it to a wireless device (U.S. 1, March 21).Top Of PageLeaving TownAdvanced TelCom Group, 993 Lenox Drive,Lawrenceville08648. Carl Thompson, general manager.No sooner had Carl J. Thompson opened an office for Advanced TelComGroup on Quakerbridge Road than ATG decided not to continue to fundthis market. Thompson flirted with the idea of continuing to workin New Jersey under his own umbrella, as Mercer Communications, buthas taken a position with ATG as general manager of the Stamford andWestchester market. Formerly with AT&T and Lucent Technologies,Thompsonis an alumnus of Notre Dame and has an MBA from the University ofChicago.ATG is a facilities-based integrated communications provider thatoffers one-stop shopping to underserved middle-sized business markets.A competitor to Verizon, it leases fiberoptic networks to deliverall its services. “We were having difficulty building on ournetworkin New Jersey because of the lack of fiber — we couldn’t get ourarms around enough of it — and we didn’t think we could deliverproper service,” says Gene Sokol, vice president marketingservices,at the company’s headquarters in Santa Rosa, California. “In someareas it was not available. In some cases, they had promised the fiberwas there, but when we arrived, it had not been laid.”Bedard Kurowicki & Co., 318 Route 202 North, Suite5, Flemington 08822. John Bedard, president. 908-782-7900; fax,908-782-4328.Www.bkc-cpa.comAndrew D. Ross has closed his tax practice on Route 27 in KendallPark and joined Bedard Kurowicki & Co. in Flemington. Bedard Kurowickialso has an office on Pennington-Washington Crossing Road.Top Of PageDeathsTheodore Lynch, 79, on May 7. He was an art teacher inPrinceton schools for 26 years.Rosemary F. Gault, 75, on May 19. He was a bacteriologistand hematologist at the Medical Center at Princeton. A service willbe Saturday, June 9, at 11:30 a.m. at Trinity Church on Mercer Street.Wilma M. Moran, 84, on May 21. She was a secretary atPrinceton Nursery for more than 60 years.Norman R. Goldstein, 72, on May 22. He founded a forensicsafety engineering consulting firm in Robbinsville.Gertrude V. Conover, 78, on May 23. She worked in thefamily business, Conover’s Bus Transportation Co., until 1988.John F. Ozwirk, 73, on May 25. Until 1990 he wasmaintenancemanager at the Institute for Advanced Study.Linda Louise West, 53, on May 26. She had worked forHopewellValley Medical Associates, Allergy & Pulmonary Associates, EwingMedicalAssociates, and the St. Lawrence Rehabilitation Center.Corrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
